[lbo-talk] Butler is not a classicist

[andie nachgeborenen]

I'm not fond of Butler's work, never made much headway with it despite assiduous efforts, thought it was a lot of unnecessarily obscurantist jargon. I acknowledge that people I respect here find a lot there, so maybe it's just that I haven't tried hard enough. Some of the people I was trained to read would be no less difficult to the blissfully uninitiated if you hadn't been waterboarded with them at grad school seminars -- Quine, Davidson, Rawls, Goodman, so may my difficulties with her may just reflect different training. 

Be that as it may. I haven't read this piece, but I certainly hope you don't have to be a classicist to possibly have something interesting to say about the classics, or based on them. Obviously there are certain limitations that lack of a scholarly basis in a discipline (classics, say) impose on the value of what you can say about work in the area, still, a nonprofessional perspective can offer valuable insights. Weil was not a "classicist" (though she knew Greek), but her essay on the Iliad (The Iliad: Poem of Might) seems to me worth a lot more than several cubic yards of "scholarly" work on Homer. 

I myself have small Latin and less Greek, but occasionally I feel the urge to opine on the classics; I am sure my lack of training and knowledge shows, but I hope what I say is interesting and useful.

And then there is work that is inspired by or based on the classics or whatever that is not necessarily offered as a "scholarly" interpretation. Hegel on Antigone comes to mind; he had the usual classical training that all educated people of his day had but he was not a "classicist," but his comments on Antigone and other aspects of Greek life, while I gather from the pros don't hold water as rigorous scholarly analyses, but they are wonderful and suggestive. 

--- On Mon, 6/9/08, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:


> From: Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Butler is not a classicist
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, June 9, 2008, 3:41 PM
> Jerry wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> >Butler's charms are in fact pretty resistible. 
> Just read her very
> >uninformed and quite ignorant essay on Antigone.  If
> she were a graduate
> >studying the classics I would never let her graduate.
> 
> 
> Butler writes:
> 
> "I am no classicist and do not strive to be one.  I
> read Antigone as 
> many humanists have because the play poses questions about
> kinship 
> and the state that recur in a number of cultural and
> historical contexts."
> 
> 
> 
> >Quite frankly reading her Antigone essay was a little
> >like seeing the construction of a con game.  Yet people
> who want to puff
> >themselves up or don't know better allow themselves
> to be conned.
> 
> 
> Heh.  And you're not puffing yourself up at all by
> saying you would 
> have flunked Butler and that anyone who reads her is a mark
> who needs 
> to be wised up?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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